The cab which picked Maitland up at his lodgings carried him but a few
blocks to the club at which he had, the previous evening, entertained
his lawyer. Maitland had selected it as the one of all the clubs of
which he and Bannerman were members, wherein he was least likely to
meet the latter. Neither frequented its sober precincts by habit. Its
severe and classical building on a corner of Madison Avenue overlooking
the Square, is but the outward presentment of an institution to be a
member of which is a duty, but emphatically no great pleasure, to the
sons of a New York family of any prominence.
But in its management the younger generation holds no suffrage; and is
not slow to declare that the Primordial is rightly named,
characterizing the individual members of the Board of Governors as
antediluvians, prehistoric monsters who have never learned that
laughter lends a savor to existence. And so it is that the younger
generation, (which is understood to include Maitland and Bannerman),
while it religiously pays its dues and has the name of the Primordial
engraved upon its cards, shuns those deadly respectable rooms and seeks
its comfort elsewhere.
Maitland found it dull and depressing enough, that same evening,
something before seven. The spacious and impressive lounging-rooms were
but sparsely tenanted, other than by the ennuied corps of servants; and
the few members who had lent the open doors the excuse of their
presence were of the elderly type that hides itself behind a newspaper
in an easy chair and snorts when addressed.
The young man strolled disconsolately enough into the billiard-room,
thence (dogged by a specter of loneliness) to the bar, and finally, in
sheer desperation, to the dining-room, where he selected a table and
ordered an evening paper with his meal.
When the former was brought him, he sat up and began to take a new
interest in life. The glaring head-lines that met his eye on the front
page proved as bracing as a slap in the face.
"'The Maitland Jewels,'" he read, half aloud: "'Daring Attempt at
Burglary. "Mad" Maitland Catches "Handsome Dan" Anisty in the Act of
Cracking His Safe at Maitland Manor. Which was Which? Both Principals
Disappear.'"
A dull red glow suffused the reader's countenance; he compressed his
lips, only opening them once, and then to emit a monosyllabic oath,
which can hardly have proved any considerable relief to his surcharged
emotional nature.
The news-story was exploited as a "beat"; it could have been little
else, since nine-tenths of its "exclusive details" had been born
full-winged from the fecund imagination of a busy reporter to whom
Maitland had refused an interview while in his bath, some three hours
earlier. Maitland discovered with relief that boiled down to essentials
it consisted simply of the statement that somebody (presumably himself)
had caught somebody (presumably Anisty) burglarizing the library safe
at Maitland Manor that morning: that one of the somebodies (no one knew
which) had overpowered the other and left him in charge of the butler,
who had presently permitted his prisoner to escape and then talked for
publication.
It was not to this so much that Maitland objected. It was the
illustrations that alternately saddened and maddened the young man: the
said illustrations comprising blurred half-tone reproductions of
photographs taken on the Maitland estate; a diagram of the library, as
fanciful as the text it illuminated, and two portraits, side by side,
of the heroes, himself and Anisty, excellent likenesses both of the
originals and of each other.
Mr. Maitland did not enjoy his dinner.
Anxious and preoccupied, he tasted the dishes mechanically; and when
they had all passed before him, took his thoughts and a cigar to a
gloomy corner of the smoking-room, where he sat for two solid hours,
debating the matter pro and con, and arriving at no conclusion
whatever, save that Higgins was doomed.
At ten-fifteen he began to contemplate with positive pleasure the
prospect of discharging the butler. That, at least, was action,
something that he could do; wherever else he thought to move he found
himself baffled by the blank darkness of mystery, or by his fear of
publicity and ridicule.
At ten-twenty he decided to move upon Greenfields at once, and
telephoned O'Hagan, advising him to profess ignorance of his employer's
whereabouts.
At ten-twenty-two, or in the midst of his admonitions to the janitor,
he changed his mind and decided to stay in New York; and instructed the
Irishman to bring him a suit-case containing a few necessaries; his
intention being to stay out the night at the club, and so avoid the
matutinal siege of his lodgings by reporters and detectives.
At ten-forty-five a club servant handed him the card of a
representative of the _Evening Journal_. Maitland directed that the
gentleman be shown into the reception-room.
At ten-forty-six he skulked out of the club by a side entrance, jumped
into a cab and had himself driven to the East Thirty-fourth Street
ferry, arriving there just in time to miss the last train for
Greenfields.
Denied the shelter alike of his lodgings, his club, and his country
home, the young man in despair caused himself to be conveyed to the
Bartholdi Hotel, where, possessed of a devil of folly, he preserved his
incognito by registering under the name of "M. Daniels." And
straightway retired to his room.
But not to rest. The portion of the mentally harassed, sleeplessness,
was his; and for an hour or more he tossed upon his bed (upon which he
had thrown himself without troubling to undress), pondering, to no
profit of his, the hundred problems, difficulties, and disadvantages
suggested or created by the events of the past twenty-four hours.
The grey girl, Anisty, the jewels, himself: unflagging, his thoughts
circumnavigated the world of his romance, touching only at these four
ports, and returning always to linger longest in the harbor of
sentiment.
The grey girl: strange that her personality should have come to
dominate his thoughts in a space of time so brief! and upon grounds of
intimacy so slender!... Who and what was she? What cruel rigor of
circumstance had impelled her to seek a livelihood in ways so sinister?
At whose door must the blame be laid, against what flaw in the body
social should the indictment be drawn, that she should have been forced
into the ranks of the powers that prey--a girl of her youth and rare
fiber, of her cultivation, her charm, and beauty?
The sheer loveliness of her, her grace and gentleness, her ingenuous
sensitiveness, her wit: they combined to make the thought of her, to
him, at least, at once terrible and a delight. Remembering that once he
had held her in his arms, had gazed into her starlit eyes, and inhaled
the impalpable fragrance of her, he trembled, was both glad and afraid.
And her ways so hedged about with perils! While he must stand aside,
impotent, a pillar of the social order secure in its shelter, and see
her hounded and driven by the forces of the Law, harried and worried
like an unclean thing, forced, as it might be, to resort to stratagems
and expedients unthinkable, to preserve her liberty....
It was altogether intolerable. He could not stand it. And yet--it was
written that their paths had crossed and parted and were never again to
touch. Or was it?... It must be so written: they would never meet
again. After all, her concern with, her interest in, him, could have
been nothing permanent. They had encountered under strange auspices,
and he had treated her with common decency, for which she had repaid
him in good measure by permitting him to retain his own property. Their
account was even, and she for ever done with him. That must be her
attitude. Why should it be anything else?
"Oh, the devil!" exclaimed the young man in disgust. And rising, took
his distemper to the window.
Leaning on the sill, he thrust head and shoulders far out over the
garish abyss of metropolitan night. The hot breath of the city fanned
up in stifling waves into his face, from the street below, upon whose
painted pavements men crawled like insects--round moving spots, to each
his romance under his hat.
The window was on the corner, overlooking the junction of three great
highways of humanity: Twenty-third Street, with its booming crosstown
cars, stretching away into the darkness on either hand; Broadway,
forking off to the left, its distances merging into a hot glow of
yellow radiance; Fifth Avenue, branching into the north with its
desolate sidewalks oddly patterned in areas of dense shadow and a cold,
clear light. Over the way the park loomed darkly, for all its scattered
arcs, a black and silent space, a well of mystery....
It was late, quite late; the clock in front of Dorlon's (he craned his
neck to see), made the hour one in the morning; the sidewalks were
comparatively deserted, even the pillared portico of the Fifth Avenue
Hotel destitute of loungers. A timid hint of coolness, forerunning the
dawn, rode up on the breeze.
He looked up and away northward, for many minutes, over housetops
stenciled black against the glowing sky, his gaze yearning into vast
distances of space, melancholy tingeing the complexion of his mind. He
fancied himself oppressed by a vague uneasiness, unaccountable as to
cause, unless....
From the sublime to the ridiculous with a vengeance, his thoughts
tumbled. Gone the glamour of Romance in a twinkling, banished by rank
materialism. He could have blushed for shame; he got slowly to his
feet, irresolute, trying to grapple with a condition that never before
in his existence had he been called upon to consider.
He had just realized that he was flat-strapped for cash. He had given
his last quarter to the cabby, hours back. He was registered at a
strange hotel, under an assumed name, unable to beg credit even for his
breakfast without declaring his identity and thereby laying himself
open to suspicion, discourtesy, insult....
Of course there were ways out. He could telephone Bannerman, or any
other of half a dozen acquaintances, in the morning; but that involved
explanations, and explanations involved making himself the butt of his
circle for many a weary day. There was money in his lodgings, in the
Chippendale escritoire; but to get it he would have to run the gauntlet
of reporters and detectives which had already dismayed him in prospect.
O'Hagan--ah!
At the head of his bed was a telephone. Impulsively, inconsiderate of
the hour, he turned to it.
"Give me Nine-o-eight-nine Madison, please," he said; and waited,
receiver to ear.
There was a slight pause; a buzz; the voice of the switchboard operator
below stairs repeating the number to Central; Central's appropriately
mechanical reiteration; another buzz; a silence; a prolonged buzz; and
again the sounding silence....
"Hello!" he said softly into the transmitter, at a venture.
No answer.
"Hello!"